While at a digital marketing conference not too long ago, I asked the presenter a question that prompted him to google my name on the spot. Admittedly, I hadn’t had my website live yet, but the search results that did come up were still about me, albeit not so much for my marketing purposes.
The first page of the search for my name yielded my LinkedIn profile and a couple of blogs I have written (pretty standard stuff), but mostly the page was dominated by my presence in the news. Luckily for me, over two years, I had been on the local news for two fairly big local stories. In 2022, I was shot outside our local minor league baseball park on the 4th of July, and in 2023 I was interviewed about a recent increase in coyote activity in the area.
Despite what you may hear about website authority, websites like news, educational resources, and large companies will always rank well because of their domain authority.
What Is Domain Authority?
This is a hotly debated subject, and I really don’t take a hard side on it because there are truths to both sides. Created by the SEO company MOZ, Domain Authority is used to try to predict how a website will rank on search engines based on factors such as the quality of backlinks. Moz does this by evaluating a website and giving it a score from 0 to 100.
Some people say that domain authority is a nonsense metric developed by Moz, and some people live by it. Google says it is not a ranking factor… Whatever. Either way, there is evidence that some websites have an advantage with search engines when it comes to the weight of their content and links from those websites.
News websites generally have good domain authority because they have links from other reputable sources, other established news sources, good traffic, good SEO strategy, and constant updates, and because of these, are considered reliable and trustworthy sources.
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How To Benefit from a Website with High Domain Authority?
Websites with high domain authority can benefit you in several ways:
- A backlink from one of these sites will give your website an SEO boost.
- A backlink or mention from a local webpage with high domain authority will give your website some local SEO signals.
- With greater visibility, these websites are highly trusted and gain a lot of traffic. Appearing on these sites can increase awareness about you or your company.
Sometimes, these websites do have advertising options, but those are generally “do not follow” links, so they don’t give you an SEO advantage, and for the most part, are a nuisance and most people ignore them these days.
However, if you can get content on a website with high domain authority in a legitimate way, such as new coverage, an article, blog, guest blog post, etc, you can gain attention and some SEO benefits. This is referred to as Earned Media.
How You Can Gain Earned Media… Other Than Getting Shot.
Other than getting shot, or monitoring a wild animal invasion, you can simply (not necessarily easily) gain earned media through outreach.
Many of these establishments strive on constant quality content and information, so they usually have established ways to get in contact to share information. By offering a news story, interview, press release, written article, blog, or other piece of quality, relevant news or content you can gain earned media if used.
Earned media is a great, free way to get your information out and gain all the advantages of a website with high domain authority.
